Coffee Run
by ProcurerFaith
Summary: Sam is cramming as much as he can into his brain on one early morning in the hope of passing his exam the next day. When he discovers that Leo drank all of his coffee, he immediately heads out for more but finds more than he bargained for...


_**Disclaimer:**_ '_Transformers' belong to Hasbro, TakaraTomy and all other associated copyright holders. I do not claim ownership to 'Transformers' or any of the numerous songs and quotes used within this story. I am not making any money from this fic. This short story is for entertainment purposes only._

_**Author's Note: **__This fic is a birthday present for Kay_Cricketed. Happy early Birthday, Miss Kay! :-D __Also, for sensitive readers, please note that this fic contains one or two uses of strong language._

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Coffee Run

Sam's eyes were red, and he could have packed the bags under them for an escape to Mexico. He searched the cupboards urgently, opening draws and banging them shut again in his desperation, cutlery clattering loudly as he did so.

"Rocketfuel, Rocketfuel, Rocketfuel…" he muttered to himself, looking in a cupboard full of bleach and other cleaning fluids. Despairingly, he hung off the cupboard doors and shouted,

"Leo! _Leo_!!"

"What?" replied a voice from two legs sticking out from beneath the kitchen table. Sam stalked over and glared at the feet, twitching in grey socks - and then at the back of the curly head of dark hair. He could see what Leo was looking at on his laptop – and it wasn't astronomy revision.

Glancing around the kitchen, Sam grabbed the nearest thing he could – the dirty fishslice from the kitchen sink. With a wicked look permeating through the curtain of tired, he used it to tickle the feet stuck out in front of him. Leo screamed and scrambled to get up, banging his head on the table as he did so.

"Don't you care about flunking out of college tomorrow?" Sam tossed the fishslice back into the sink. "I don't remember there being any constellations called-" and he scrutinised the laptop screen "- Canni Spunkalot." He looked vaguely ill for a moment before turning back to his search.

"And what have you done with my Rocketfuel!?"

"Rocketfuel?" Leo rubbed the bump on his head ruefully. "You mean that really strong coffee?"

"Yes! Yes, that really strong coffee, what did you do with it?" Sam said, putting a bag of pasta and some very out-of-date spices on the counter as he searched deeper in the relatively unexplored spaces of the apartment kitchen.

"What do you normally do with it? I drank it." Leo said, crawling back underneath the kitchen table to retrieve his laptop. Sam sagged immediately, and moaned like he'd been hit somewhere sensitive with a baseball.

"Two years, Leo. Two years we've been in college and you _still _don't know how to keep your hands off my stuff? I swear to God it's like sharing my apartment with a kleptomaniac, porn-surfing, alien-obsessed monkey!" Sam ranted, slamming the cupboard doors hard and rubbing his face.

"We have five hours until the exam and I have no coffee. I still have two units to revise and if I don't have coffee, I'm going to be asleep before I can get to unit 54 and I'll be sleeping in the middle of the exam, drooling all over the paper!" Sam smacked his head repeatedly on a cupboard door, trying to keep himself awake long enough not to panic.

"Get Bumblebee to take you out and get some. C'mon, it's not like you have to be safe to drive!" Leo said grumpily, laptop under one arm and examining his hand for blood as he stumbled towards his bedroom.

Sam stood silently for a moment, before conceding that if five hours minus one hour equalled four hours, he could still cram in one unit plus one unit equalling an exam pass.

Sam clambered into Bee, looking every bit as exhausted as he felt.

"Bee, can you drive? I don't think I'm up to it." Sam asked, clicking his seatbelt into the clasp. Bee trilled in concern, and piped Brahms Lullaby into the cabin in response as he started his engine quietly.

"Don't – don't do that, Bee, not unless you want me to flunk right out of school. I need coffee…" Sam muttered, fighting to keep his eyes from rolling.

"'Way down among Brazilians, coffee beans grow by the billions…So they've got to find those extra cups to fill...

"'They got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil…'" Bee comforted, as the streetlamps of the college gave way to the streetlamps of the main road, the light sliding over his highly polished bonnet and in through the tinted windscreen.

"'S a long way to go for coffee, Bee," Sam slurred. "Jus' stop at the 7-Eleven on Fiveways."

Bee continued to play Sinatra's 'The Coffee Song' for the next five minutes, before eventually pulling up at the said 7-Eleven. It was in a questionable part of town – if any place could be called the wrong side of the tracks, this was it. In fact, you could have put up a sign with an arrow pointing in just about any direction which said 'Right side of the Tracks – 23 miles'. The convenience store was placed strategically beside a bank, a liquor store and a gun shop. Sam had previously joked that you could go to the liquor store, get drunk, buy a gun and hold up the bank – everything you needed to commit a felony in one fell swoop.

Sam pulled at the door handle as Bee turned off his engine, but Bee snapped down the door locks in protest.

"Bumblebee! What are you-what-why?" Sam said, tapping his palm on the window.

"'We been spending most our lives living in the Gangsta's Paradise…" was Bee's response, followed by a distinctly unhappy grinding sound.

"It'll be fine, I'm gonna be maybe two minutes. Two minutes, Bee. If I'm not out, you can come get me. Okay?" Once again, Bee grumbled loudly but he did unlock his doors so that Sam could climb out into the night.

There was an unseasonable chill in the air as Sam headed towards the door of the 7-Eleven. He shivered as the cold permeated even his moderately warm hooded jacket. The bottom panel of the 7-Eleven door was made of wood rather than glass, and it dawned on Sam then that this probably wasn't a fun place to work. The bell over the door rung as he entered the store, smiled briefly at the wary clerk and trundled to the back of the store, looking over instant ramen, bottles of ketchup and boxes of stock cubes until he finally found his holy grail.

"Coffee…" he murmured, both hands out to the jar of Rocketfuel before him. He was just about ready to hug the jar, he was so pleased to find it.

Remembering his promise to Bee, he headed back towards the counter to make payment. He hadn't noticed the two men come into the store behind him, two men that the clerk was watching with extreme caution. One of the clerk's hands was firmly placed on something beneath the counter, and he paid no attention to Sam at all as he approached, digging in his back pocket for the money to pay for his lifeblood.

Out in the car park, Bee was counting. 83 seconds…84 seconds…85 seconds… He grizzled unhappily – he didn't like this area at all, and the idea of Sam being alone in it made him desperate. Sam hadn't bothered to lock his doors either. It wasn't as though Sam ever locked Bee up – why lock up a robotic alien who, when irked enough, could put a spanner through your head at five hundred feet? It seemed a little like more effort than it was worth. However, Bee felt that it was the principle of the thing, and was slightly hurt.

While Bee continued to ponder the principle of that particular thing and reached the 93rd second, a man slunk up beside him. He looked both ways and pulled the driver's side door open, much to Bumblebee's dismay. Bee immediately pulled it shut again, trapping the man's fingers in-between the frame and the door. The man squealed like a girl and pulled out the weapon he'd been hiding in his waistband. Without pausing he took two shots at Bee's door handle, making the Autobot screech and release his hold.

In the store, Sam glanced up. That noise had sounded uncomfortably familiar. As he continued to look up, the two other men in the store made their way slowly over towards the clerk, whose hand clasped tighter around the handle of the hidden shotgun beneath the counter. Something needled at Sam's spine – all the bad feelings he'd had when he got out of the car seemed to rally round him; the grey of the store seemed to close in, and he had eyes only for the ever shortening gap between the clerk and the two men – one of whom seemed suddenly to have a gun in his hand. It didn't take long for his accomplice to take out a matching one, and at that Sam decided that sliding out of sight would be a very good idea.

As the man in the parking lot climbed into Bee's driver's seat and pulled the door shut, he heard a low metallic growl. The man paused for a moment, wondering where the noise was coming from, before tugging at the steering column in an attempt to get the cover off so he could hotwire the Camero. Once again, he heard the metallic growl and paused, frozen in his seat as an articulated probe quickly and suddenly appeared from the centre of the steering wheel, split into two, and poked him sharply in both eyes. The man screeched in agony and grasped at his face. As he did so, Bee snatched the gun with the probe, hefted the seat and whacked the man's face onto the dashboard repeatedly - so hard that he left tooth marks in the perfect finish.

When the man was all but unconscious, Bee opened the door with a highly indignant noise and turfed him out onto the tarmac. As the man tottered on his knees, trying desperately to see straight and wondering what the hell just happened, Bee started his engine and gunned it, moving as though to reverse over him. The man screamed like a six year old girl whose lolly had just been stolen and forced himself to his feet, stumbling and tripping towards the exit to the car park, and into the road. Cars screeched to avoid him, and Bee trumpeted,

"'Wouldja do me a favour, Harry? Drop dead!'"

With that, Bee repaired the holes in his door and noted the time. Sam had been in the store for approximately 213 seconds – or almost four minutes. After Bee's recent experience, he didn't like that. He didn't like that _at all_. Starting his engine, he drove over to the nearby gas station, hoping to conceal himself just a little with the station itself and the surrounding trees as he transformed into his anthropomorphic form. Sharp blue eyes scanned parking lot and the 7-Eleven, and Bee mooned softly as he got down to his knees.

Sam covered his mouth and tried not to breathe. The clerk shouldn't have tried to resist, he shouldn't have tried to resist, he should have just given them the money, oh God there was blood and brain everywhere. Even in his current position, sprawled out on the floor behind a shelf filled with household goods, Sam clasped the jar of coffee to his chest in the same way he had once held the Allspark.

The two men were in the till now; Sam could hear them. He could hear the chink of coins against the plastic tray, hear them speaking quickly and quietly to one another; they'd done this before. There was no panic in their voices - just cold, calm calculation and preparedness.

"Two - grab some of the smokes and bottles of spirit," the man who appeared to be in change said.

"Sure, One," said his accomplice, and Sam could hear him doing so.

It was okay, it was all right, once they got what they wanted they'd go, they'd leave him in the store, they didn't know he was there, it would all be okay, and he could go home and continue cramming for his exam… Sam's thoughts were a-whirl with nonsenses and desperation. The rest of the night would not be normal, not in the slightest.

"Where the fuck is Three?" One cursed loudly. "Can't trust him even to hotwire a damned car." The man looked up briefly – and froze as he looked into the store's security mirror. In it he could see Sam – coffee clasped to his chest, eyes closed, legs spread apart in front of him as he sat on the floor. One clenched his teeth together silently and prodded Two. He pointed to the mirror and they looked at each other. Two nodded grimly and headed silently to the back of the store.

The sudden silence fell over Sam like a lick of black paint. As it endured, he could almost hear the hairs on the back of his neck standing to attention. He kept his eyes closed throughout, and it wasn't until he heard shoes on the gritty floor next to him that he opened his eyes and looked up.

"Sorry, kid. Nothing personal," said Two, and aimed his gun at Sam's forehead.

"No! No! Don't do that, I mean, I'm a reasonable guy, I'm sure we can come to an arrangement-" Sam said quickly, one hand open and shaking in front of him, the other still wrapped around the coffee jar. "I like coffee, you like coffee? I make, I make a really good instant coffee, I could make some now and we could just talk about this, okay, we could just talk, I mean, seriously, I-"

Two lowered the gun for a moment and laughed sharply.

"Hey One!" he called. "He wants to know if we want to come up for coffee!" There was no answer, and as Two turned he saw One having the wind squeezed out of him by what looked like a long, metallic chain. Two froze where he stood, his mocking smile stuck on his face as though the wind had changed. Outside the 7-Eleven's plate windows was what looked like a huge yellow and black robot head, with the most piercing blue eyes imaginable. It blinked and made a distinct growling sound.

"Jesus! What is that!? What the fuck is that!?" Two ranted, when he could finally find his voice. He pointed his gun at Bee, who screeched indignantly and got to his feet.

Sam knew that voice as well as his own; whether it could form words or not. He still suspected that Bee was playing up his inability to speak – but regardless of whether or not words were present, Sam had rarely been so pleased to hear that sound. He poked his head around the side of the aisle and screamed,

"Bumblebee!"

At that, there was a ripping, tearing sound, a sound like buildings being destroyed and cars being scrapped, a sound like-

A roof being torn off. Sam clambered for cover as bits of wood and concrete and roof debris fell in on the 7-Eleven, covering everything in a thick layer of dust. By this time One was unconscious on the floor, and Two was still frozen in terror, looking up at a very angry Bee – and he was ready to sting.

Two forced himself into action and raised his gun again, firing pot shots at the Autobot, which bounced off him and flew into some nearby trees. Bee batted one bullet off with the back of his hand, before changing his right hand into a gun and aiming it directly at Two.

"' You've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?'" Bee said, in Clint Eastwood's gravely voice. He followed up with,

"'I don't like your manners.'" in the less gravely voice of Lauren Bacall. Two couldn't find the presence of mind suddenly to respond or even pull the trigger on his gun. At this, Bee leaned over the wrecked roof and prodded him – hard – in the forehead with his gun. Two fell backwards to the floor, seemingly dead to the world. The appearance of an alien robot – and not only an alien robot but an alien robot pointing a gun at him that was insanely bigger than his – seemed to have been too much for him, and he'd passed out where he stood.

Bee transformed his arm and purred, putting the hand down for Sam, who was still in the corner clutching his coffee jar. Sam let Bee lift him gently out of the remains of the 7-Eleven, just as their attention was caught by emergency services sirens nearby.

"Whoah there, that's…that's kinda nauseating when I'm this tired, Bee," Sam murmured as Bee carried him of to the relative safety of the trees by the gas station. Bee purred again and put his precious cargo down on his feet, immediately changing back into his Camero form. He opened his driver's side door immediately, saving Sam the trouble and started his engine. Sam climbed in, clicked in his seatbelt and Bee closed the door, managing to pull out into mainstream traffic before the emergency response teams came into sight.

Sam sat back in the chair as Bee drove serenely back to the dorm. His evening had been ruined; his plans had been smashed and now he was too tired and disturbed to do much of anything. His exam was pushed to the back of his mind and although it was still there, picking and prodding at his brain cells as though they were carrion, he found he could give it little attention.

However, being this tired did have something to say for itself. It made him very frank.

"Bee?" Bee chirruped in response.

"You're always there for me, Bee. Why don' I listen to you more?" Bee purred.

"'Listen to me, mister. You're my knight in shining armor. Don't you forget it. You're going to get back on that horse, and I'm going to be right behind you, holding on tight, and away we're gonna go, go, go!'" The slightly scathing tones of Katherine Hepburn this time.

"Technically, thass' you. And technically I didn' pay for my coffee," Sam rubbed his eyes. They felt like they had grit in them, and he didn't know if it was because he was just too tired, or if they were full of roof dust.

"D'you only know the classics, Bee?"

"'I wanna remember us just as we are now.'" The familiar voice of Brad Pitt.

"Guess not. Whass that movie again…?

"Guess it doesn't matter…" Sam said, his eyes sliding shut against his will. When they were closed though, there was little he could do to open them. The gritty feeling slowly ebbed away, and his limbs felt as heavy as lead.

"Love you, Bee."

Bee purred quietly as he sensed the vital signs of his friend and charge drift into those indicating sound sleep.

"'I love you. I've loved you since the first moment I saw you. I guess maybe I've even loved you before I saw you.'" Bee said in the voice of Montgomery Clift.

"'It's amazing, Molly. The love inside, you take it with you.'" It was Patrick Swayze, this one and final time as Bee drove deliberately past the dorm, soothing his charge with the comfort of the road and with that of good friends.

_~Fini~_

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Thank you so much for reading to the end! I hope you liked my offering :)


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